Free software and open source philosophies differ, sometimes with radically different outcomes

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

Just to note that I'm also "pro-business", also because I believe in the
other half of freedoms 2 and 3.

But as was evidenced here, and in the parent thread I replied, my
"pro-business" mood changes when seeing businesses getting in the way of
the advance of free/libre software *philosophy* (not just in regards to
the product/result/software itself).

Alessandro Rubini made an interesting point: market dominance isn't
addressed with free/libre software philosophy (nor with its
products). Personally speaking, I think one way out of this market
dominance issue would be standardization (be it with formal process such
as what was done with email, XMPP, SIP, HTML, vCard, RSS feeds, Atom
feeds, CSV, ODF; or with informal one in free/libre software, such as
what was done with LaTeX documents/spreadsheets/slides/images, Emacs Org
mode documents/spreadsheets/slides/images and Ledger-CLI accounting
files (these last two have the benefit of being simple to both *read*
and edit in plain/simple text editors, at least for basic
functionality)).

Besides, LaTeX documents can be interpreted by many compilers that are
able to understand LaTeX syntax, there is LaTeX, LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX (?),
ConTeXt (?), htlatex (?), mk4ht (?). For Org mode documents I know GNU
Emacs and Pandoc can convert or export these (in the case of GNU Emacs,
it supports everything; as for Pandoc, I don't know how far the support
is/was implemented). As for Ledger-CLI, there are other applications
that if I'm not mistaken are similar to it (although I don't know if
they understand and use the same "standard"), in some point of Ledger
history it supported GnuCash files, but this is no longer true.

Note that in some cases a "player" is so big that it starts derailing
from the standard or acting badly towards other "players", for example
in vCard standard, some big "players" such as addressbook managers in
phones, web and popular ones in email clients or specific computer
software started deviating from the standard or abusing either "ADDR",
"LABEL" or "X-" fields ([1][2]). Also, see the case of WhatsApp, which
uses a XMPP non-compliant variant (FunXMPP) and which requires phone
numbers ("fun" for who?). Finally, email service providers, see how bad
it is for the bigger ones to be more advertised than the small local
ones, and then find out that most of all the providers have some bad
configuration that denies your legitimate emails and requires you to run
non-free software in order to authenticate both as a user or for proving
that you are not sending spam to their clients/users.

[1] <https://github.com/scheibler/khard>.

[2] <https://alessandrorossini.org/the-sad-story-of-the-vcard-format-and-its-lack-of-interoperability/>.

2017-11-22T12:37:50+0100 Alessandro Rubini wrote:
>
> Those who disagree are more vocal than those who agree. Always.
>
> FWIW, I agree (and, yes, I am a member of FSFE). And I chose to keep silent
> becuase saying "+1" is just needless noise.
>
> As for being pro-business, it doesn't mean being pro-monopolists or
> pro-corporations or pro-capitalist.  In my case I am pro-business ("as
> a valid exercise of individual freedom too") exactly because only
> doing business (keeping code and information available) can limit the
> damages of our monopolistic technological environment.  If you are
> anti-business, you fall into "free for non-commercial use", which was
> never considered FS, BTW.
>
> Trying to stay out of the market is self-destructive, in my opinion.
> I sometimes do as a personal choice, in some environments or about
> some vendors, but I avoid promoting it as a solution for the evil of
> the world. If you do so, you bring all of your ideas (including the
> good ones) to be discarded with laugh and despise.
>
> /alessandro
> _______________________________________________
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion at lists.fsfe.org
> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
>

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